Telephones are one of the most widely used communication tools in the world. At first, telephones were merely a convenient tool to allow people to communicate while they were physically separated. More recently, however, many companies use telephones to market products and services, provide technical support to customers, allow customers to access their own financial data, and so forth.
In order to more effectively use telephones for business and marketing purposes, call centers have been developed. In a call center, a relatively large number of agents handle telephone communication with clients. The matching of calls between clients and agents is typically performed by software. A simple example is used here to describe a few of the many advantages of using call centers. When a call is made to a call center, the telephone number of the calling line is typically made available to the call center by a telephone carrier. Based on this telephone number, the software in the call center can access a database to obtain information about the client who has that phone number. The software can then better route the call to an agent who can best handle the call based on predefined criteria (e.g., language skill, knowledge of products the customer bought, etc.). The software also immediately transfers relevant information about the client to a computer screen used by the agent. Thus, the agent can gain valuable information about the customer prior to receiving the call. As a result, the agent can more effectively handle the telephone transaction.
It can be seen from the above example that the enabling technology requires a combination of telephone switching and computer information processing technologies. The term commonly used in the art for this combined technology is computer-telephony-integration (CTI).
In recent years, advances in computer technology, telephony equipment, and infrastructure have provided many opportunities for improving telephone service. Similarly, development of the information and data network known as Internet, together with advances in computer hardware and software have led to a new multimedia telephone system which will be referred to herein as data-network-telephony (DNT) which encompasses all multimedia-based communication including Internet Protocol Network Telephony (IPNT). IPNT is a special case of Data Network Telephony (DNT) wherein telephone calls are computer-simulated, and audio data is transmitted in the form of data packets.
In DNT systems as well as in the older intelligent and CTI-enhanced telephony systems, both privately and publicly-switched, it is desirable to handle more calls faster and to provide improved service in every way. This desire applies to multimedia-based communications in addition to telephone calls, as some call centers have moved to combine DNT with CTI technologies. It is emphasized that computer-simulated calls attributed to DNT may be made over company Intranets and other sorts of data networks as well as the Internet. The Internet is primarily used an as an example in this specification because it is broad and pervasive with universal protocol.
One of the major goals of any call center is to maximize client satisfaction. Part of the satisfaction that a client might receive from doing business with a company relates to how quickly and efficiently he or she is served. For example, when a client calls in to place an order for a product or service, he or she does not want to be put on hold for a lengthy period of time.
If a client sends an E-mail, Voice mail or another type of multimedia communication, he or she does not want to be overlooked or forgotten on an agent's computer. Rather, the client desires that a timely and professional response will be sent back by the company. This is especially true with company-to-company buying of products or services. A typical buyer has many duties that can be interrupted because of inordinate amounts of time spent waiting to place an order. In these types of situations, idle time costs money, and in many cases, cannot be tolerated. Many orders are lost by companies who have put clients in long waiting queues or subjected them to long waiting periods for multimedia responses. Such clients often become annoyed, perhaps searching for a suitable competitor who can meet their needs in a timely manner.
With call centers evolving into sophisticated and fast-paced contact centers wherein telephone and multimedia communications are routine, it becomes desirable to be able to prioritize and intelligently route all forms of communication with the goal of expedient and professional service to the client in mind.
Intelligent routing rules put in place in some intelligent networks known to the inventors have provided some relief for callers who would be stuck in queue much longer without them. For example, in some intelligent networks known to the inventor, skill-based routing, predictive routing, routing based on agent availability, as well as other intelligent implementations have provided for a better use of agent time within a call-center environment, thereby shortening queue length and reducing waiting time. However, even with these developments, there are certain peak periods during call-center operation that long waiting queues are unavoidable. Also, Intelligent routing rules, such as predictive routing or routing based on skill set of the agent are somewhat limited in current art to conventional telephone apparatus and calls, which are termed in this specification Connection-Orientated Switched Telephony (COST) calls.
Another problem in the current art involves separation of different protocols that are associated with different communication forms. Intelligent routing must typically be separately implemented for each communication method that uses a separate protocol. For example, an E-mail routing system would typically be separate from a COST call routing system, and so on. No viable solutions have been offered in current art that would integrate and combine functions of a routing system in order to provide priority and skill based routing for COST calls as well as DNT calls including multimedia communications.
The inventor is aware of a queuing system for a contact center wherein the system is adapted to queue voice mails as well as live telephone calls. In a preferred embodiment the calls include both connection-oriented switched telephony (COST) calls and Data Network Telephony (DNT) calls. Callers are enabled to leave voice mail as an alternative to waiting, and records of the voice mails are queued, preferably in the same queue processing the live calls. In some embodiments the call center is enabled to process e-mails, video mails and facsimile messages as well as live calls and voice mail messages, and all types of multimedia communication can be queued in the same queue according to pre-stored routing rules and priority rules.
Skill-based intelligent routing as used in communication-center routing schemes has long been associated on a per-media basis and connected to more basic routing intelligence such as routing based on real-time availability or even predicted availability. In other words, when a customer calls in, first an available agent is found that meets a certain pre-set skill value in terms of possessing a certain type of specialized skill required of the caller. For example, if a Spanish-speaking customer is looking for assistance, the agent selected would have to possess the basic skills required to service the interests of the caller and the particular skill of speaking Spanish. Skills then are largely pre-set values that are quantified and qualified for agents before creating intelligent routing routines that utilize the values in routing. Skill predeterminations for agents working in a communications center environment are limited to real-value skills like the ability to speak Spanish, the ability to process certain documents, knowledge in certain areas of business function, access to certain external data sources, and so on.
Availability routing routines are based on the availability of an agent in real-time and can be discerned in real-time during execution of an intelligent routine. The inventor knows of predictive agent-availability routines that can predict a probability factor of whether or not a particular agent or group of agents will be available at a certain point in time. Predictive routines eliminate some of the steps required of real agent-availability routines and therefore streamline the routing process even if they are somewhat less reliable in producing an available agent for a caller waiting in queue.
Agent availability routines, unlike traditional load-balancing routines, are particular to agents' media responsibilities as practiced at their stations for agent-level-routing (ALR). In a multimedia-capable contact center for example, any one agent may be responsible for several communications mediums like telephone, e-mail, voice mail, Internet telephony, Fax, file transfers, and so on. Unlike determining agent loads at switches, shared queues, and other major routing points, agent availability based on media is concerned with the ongoing local tasks of an agent who may be handling several communications mediums simultaneously at his or her station.
One way to determine agent availability for routing is to monitor the agent meticulously, such as by requiring the agent to log in and out of communications tasks and/or assigning specific tasks for specific periods. For example, when an agent is logged in answering e-mail, he or she is somewhat less available for answering other mediums of communications like COST telephone, or file transfers. Some agents may be determined to be unavailable for all other mediums if a telephony queue reaches a certain threshold. Therefore, it can be seen that modern agent-availability values are largely scalar in nature and based on current queue loads and real-time agent scheduling. Typically, from the caller's viewpoint, an agent is determined to be busy or not busy. Aside from strict management of what mediums an agent is allowed to work with at any given period, predicting the true availability of an agent across multiple mediums is not practiced.
It has occurred to the inventors that multimedia queue capabilities and event prioritization as taught in the related case U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,066 listed above can be enhanced with local knowledge of agent interaction or communication systems status and communications-medium-based agent skill assessments to produce an intelligent routing routine that incorporates both skills and availability factors across multiple mediums.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a method of intelligent routing that computes real-time agent availability across multiple communications mediums wherein the computed value also accounts for agent up-to-date skill levels in handling the mediums encountered. Such a method would provide a predictive routine that would further streamline multimedia queues and result in faster event processing and customer satisfaction.